Murdered: Soul Suspect’s first red herring comes five minutes in. As dead detective Ronan O’Connor, you are promised an enormous and exciting ghostly skillset with which to solve complex crimes, right wrongs, and gain unbridled access to the real-world town of Salem, Massachusetts. But by the time the credits roll, that promise has only been partially fulfilled. Being a ghost in Murdered is enjoyable in fits and starts, yet the use of your powers is brutally limited, resulting in an almost entirely scripted and therefore watered-down afterlife experience.
Our hero Ronan is a roughly sketched amalgam of every anti-authority, lone-wolf detective popularised in film during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s; a gravel-voiced cliche under a fedora. Yet the mystery lying at his feet is more unusual than most, as Ronan has a series of bulletholes in his chest and his ‘unfinished business’ is to discover the identity of his own killer.
It’s a powerful whodunnit set-up, which kept me invested - just - for the ten hours it took to reach the reveal, despite narrative shortcomings elsewhere. An insistent yet irrelevant sub-plot involving Ronan’s wife, for example, evokes a particularly clunky romance novella, while the thoughts of possessed citizens that Ronan is able to hear are oddly mundane. The supporting cast fails to make an impression too, save for Joy, a spirited young medium - terrifically voiced by Entourage actress Cassidy Lehrmam - who deserves more screen-time.
Similarly, Salem, with its rich real-life history, feels wasted as a setting. Murdered’s small sandbox, (truly the loosest use of that term), offers little variation in environment and restricts the player's natural instinct to explore it at every turn. One of its more interesting features; a ghostly overlay of parts of the town during its most notorious years in the 1600s, is mostly used as an environmental trick to prevent you from going beyond the game world’s close confines. The explanation for this feels arbitrary: Ronan can’t pass through other ghostly matter because he’s a ghost, and he can’t access three quarters of the town’s buildings as they’ve been ‘consecrated’ by Salem’s citizens. The developer didn’t have time to make a bigger, more interesting world, in other words.
Such limitations extend to your toolbox. While Ronan can, theoretically, do all the cool things you’d want a ghost detective to be able to do: walk through (some) walls, analyse the ghostly residue of a murder scene, interrogate other ghosts, possess humans and animals to influence them and read their thoughts, and move objects about like a poltergeist - you’ll rarely find any use for his abilities outside of the tightly scripted story which you’re funneled through.
This is particularly frustrating considering Ronan’s investigations in Murdered require very little actual brain work. The business of solving puzzles, which boils down to ‘analysis’ of a crime scene by either collecting every clue using your ghost skills and selecting the most relevant one, or linking together a series of clues to form a cohesive timeline of events, equates to meaningless busywork as the solution is more often than not blindingly obvious from the get-go.
The ability to scrutinise the ghostly residue of a dramatic memory captured in a three-dimensional still - the killer searching for a victim, for example, or a cowering victim sobbing in terror - is perhaps the most ridiculously simplistic in Ronan's investigatory repertoire. It’s hard to feel the developer is taking us seriously when our multiple-choice descriptors of someone pleading for their life are words like Scared, In Charge, Calm, Tense or Confident. For a game centered on a murder mystery, it’s baffling that Murdered is devoid of any real, challenging sleuthing.
When the answers aren’t so obvious - and generally this is when the task at hand, not the solution, is obtuse - there seems to be no consequence for failure. Even when you don’t guess the most relevant clue on your first attempt, there is no option but to get to the answer eventually through process of elimination. While you are rated on your ‘detective work’ on a case by case basis, the judgement seems meaningless; no branching storylines are shut off from you for screwing up, and there is no overall rank offered at the end to make you want to try again and do better.
Enemy encounters, which are few and far between, offer more room for freedom and tactical thinking. The only way to dispose of Murdered’s genuinely frightening soul-sucking demons is to get immediately behind them, and the only way to get immediately behind them is to hide in the residue of individual ghost souls, which are tightly packed together and therefore create a sort of teleportation system for Ronan. It’s a neat, fun idea, and one that is bizarrely underutilised and unexplored for a game trying to sell an atmosphere of danger.
A multitude of side quests pump a little life into Murdered. Populated throughout Salem are ghosts who, like Ronan, are stuck between this world and the next by virtue of their unfinished business. Ronan can help these people move on by solving their conundrums, and while the process of doing so is no more satisfactory than it is in the central quest, many of these encounters are memorable stories. Helping a guy who can’t remember who was behind the wheel in a drunk-driving accident, for example, or revealing the heroic nature of a death to someone who thought otherwise, are nice little human touches in a larger story that regularly serves to remind you of the futility of death.